Ashley Lopez

It is a group of voters that are usually more engaged, the ideological partisans of the party sort of hashing out where they want the party to go.

And especially when you have safe seats like this, which there are a lot, and we could talk about that.

This is like kind of the safest place to hash these conversations out.

And so I'm not surprised because if the base of the party has been saying they don't

like the direction that the party has been going when it comes to immigration.

There were a lot of complaints from the base of the Democratic Party that the Harris campaign, for example, was not vociferously defending immigrants and Democrats on the Hill are not doing enough to fight back against ICE like

You know, the conversation hasn't been to fully defund or abolish ICE on the Hill.

And that has really angered a lot of base Democratic voters.

So I'm not surprised to see this at all.

It will be interesting to see how many of these safe Democratic seats lose their incumbents, because that is a sign that the base is really angry and they want to see the party move in a different direction.

But if you're going to see fights over over stuff like this, it's going to be in a safe Democratic seat.

So North Carolina was already pretty gerrymandered for Republicans.

So they really just took aim at one seat that was held by a long term Democrat there in the House.

And so it's just one extra seat.

But I will say this, like, broadly speaking, this arms race in redistricting has yet to yield any sort of meaningful edge for either party.

But I did do some reporting recently that

What it did do was it created more safe seats in Congress.

So each party just has more safe seats.

That means there are fewer competitive races heading into the general.

The most voting power many voters are going to have is going to be in these primaries.